Good evening and a very warm welcome to the Oxford Martin School, I'm Ian Golden, the former director of the school,
and it's a huge pleasure to introduce this evening Professor Robin Cohen Robbins, a very good old friend.
I first met him when I was doing my doctorate in Oxford, and he was professor of sociology at Warwick.
He's been a professor in many, many universities in the West Indies, in Nigeria and South Africa, and here in Oxford,
where he was professor in the International Development Department and was the director of the International Migration Institute,
which was one of the groups that the Oxford Martin School founded to work on migration.
He's someone who I've always thought of as one of the wisest,
clearest thinkers on migration and who's been able to combine a passion for the subject with extremely deep analytical rigour and policy coherence,
and has always approached it in a different way to many others with a real feel for
the people involved and has introduced into the literature many vital dimensions,
not least related to the Diaspora and diversity.
So it's with huge pleasure that we launch in Oxford this evening, his new book, Migration and it's incredibly well-produced book.
Robin is going to be selling it afterwards at the giveaway price of £10 because it actually says £20 on the back,
and I think it must have cost about £30 a copy to produce because it's so full of colourful illustrations,
and it's really a very, very beautifully produced book.
But is it is the best summary I've seen of the various strands of what's significant in migration,
and I can think of no better way of thinking and seeing oneself into this extremely complex and increasingly vital subject.
So Robin provenance with huge pleasure that I ask you to introduce us to the book.
Well, thank you very much, and I particularly want to thank in not only for his generous marks, but, of course,
the fact that he helped to launch the International Migration Institute, which now has found a new home at the University of Amsterdam.
And we were a very friendly school in the Oxford Martin School,
a very great launch to a brilliant idea and and there's been a very distinguished director of it.
OK, so this is a book called the title of which is rather a sort of grand.
And of course, publishers being what they are, they want the bigger, the better the wilder.
So you can imagine it's not completely simple to say that even humankind from prehistory to the present and
squeeze everything in of significance and impact the way the book is set out is that there are 44 chapters.
There is some guiding principle to this these chapters.
What should we say? It's less than comprehensive and more than random property is the easiest way to explain it,
but we won't be able to get through these chapters in great detail this evening.
So I'm going to pick out three themes.
The first theme, which is also the title of the first chapter out of Africa when migration and human migration began.
The second looking at Irish immigration, I think it's sort of middle period of the historical period that I'm covering.
And in the final period, which combines two themes looking at the growth of migration and in particular,
the mass displacement of refugees and other survival migrants, and how, if any way the attempt to try and wall people off is working or not.
Working will also be time for question and answer a little later on.
And I'll take the opportunity to read very briefly from each of those three themes something in the book.
So the first theme in South Africa and of course, migration scholars have to learn new skills.
In the old days. It was all. In fact, it was linguistic traces.
It was fossil remains. Now it's DNA and we have a DNA map.
They're tracing human migration. I'll show you another one a little later on.
First half of Africa and then the yellow banding and erectus and the orange banding and the end of [INAUDIBLE].
And of course, there's been a lot of stuff in the newspapers every now and again.
There's a new discovery, a new fossil, a new bit, and that seems to throw people off and say something.
Oh, they didn't come from Africa. Some of them came from Europe.
This is not the case. Human migration starts in Africa, and Neanderthals also start in Africa, although at a different time.
But a couple of years ago, there was a lot of publicity around the meeting of the Undersells and Homo sapiens in the southwest of Europe.
But about two percent of the genome of humans are now seem to have Neanderthal.
So that's very interesting because it implies that humans were not quite as smart,
didn't out with the undersells as had subsequently as had previously been thought.
We also just had just last month, the discovery of the new discovery of AU Human Being started in Botswana or Namibia was the year before.
And of course, it is the case that there are, if you like, in Africa to zones that are very important.
One is South Africa, southern Africa going up towards the normally the Namibian border and it's the cradle of humankind.
And if you want to express it in a slightly different way, East Africa,
the Rift Valley can be easily represented as the nursery of humankind a little later on.
Well, I wanted to. Focus on this slide, because in this book, I have a discussion, I say thinking upside down.
And it's a counterfactual, and you probably know that historians and others are rather not very keen on counterfactuals.
I say, please don't use counterfactual. Actually, I like counterfactuals because the conflict was all what would have happened if and they say,
Oh no, look, deal with reality, deal with how it was done.
Deal counterfactual. All the good questions are based on counterfactuals,
and the counterfactual in this case is what would have happened if we hadn't had urban civilisations.
What if we had remained rather like the people in that in that slide?
So I'm going to read just a short passage. We often imagine civilisation as the triumph of the sedentary over the mobile.
But human settlements have created enormous problems with humans bumped up against each other,
diseases spread while many city planners have struggled to provide adequate food, housing,
transport, security, education, potable water and sewage to feed urban populations.
The countryside has been blighted by commercial agriculture, pesticides and land clearances.
As the planet itself has become threatened by pollution, climate change and global exploitation.
Perhaps we can learn something from a more ecologically sensitive migration ancestors.
Now, these ancestors spent something of the order of 35 hours a week foraging for food.
We have to spend at least 10 hours a week more in developed countries and workers in developing countries spend double again.
So maybe it wasn't quite so tough out there.
It may have been somewhat easier than is easily imagined.
So this is the other diagram that I wanted to show you, and it's really kind of an interesting venture.
Paul Salopek is doing a seven to 10 mile walk.
We're not quite sure how long it's going to take for the National Geographic setting out from the Rift Valley,
and he's basically walking to the Cape Horn and along the way is reporting for the National Geographic magazine.
But the virtue of this map is that it sort of gives us a sense for the first time.
I think basis period, those slices are in a different time zones and also of the practicalities of it.
So you can see somehow that it made sense that the continents did link together in some obvious sense.
Now, of course, it's not the case that it was a simple movement from place to place be they may have been three different movements out of Africa.
There was definitely a big move back as I think people hit Siberia and said this is mighty cold and turned back again.
So it's not a simple story, and we have to spend a long time trying to uncover these as new fossil remains and become manifest.
OK, so that's the first theme. Now we jumping, you know, quite long, a lot of years, and we go to our second theme.
And the second theme is about Irish immigration, and I thought quite hard about what?
To select for today's talk, and I thought this sort of makes sense because suddenly Ireland is in our minds again,
we think about it in relation to Northern Ireland and Brexit.
We even had, I think, a minister talking terms of food being a potential source of leverage against the Irish in some Brexit related discussion.
Quite unaware, of course, of the horrific story of the famine.
The exodus from Ireland in 1846 to 1951, when the potato crop failed and Irish people were forced to leave Ireland,
losing about 20 to 25 per cent of the total population is very high in that short period of time.
And this sculpture, I think, is a very, very moving sculpture actually.
In the book, we only use one of the figures rather than this whole figure.
But I like this particular one because you can see the normality of people walking alongside in the paths and these very strange,
haunting Giacometti like figures on Dublin docks,
which tell the extraordinary story of people being driven to the United States, to Britain and to and to the island to Australia.
But I want to use this story in another sense as well. It's a slightly odd tale.
One of the theories of migration, we have many theories of migration, of course,
but ones that have been kind of disappeared off the face of scholarship is the theory developed by Marx and Angles,
and they developed a theory of migration entirely from the Irish experience.
Engels, actually, as you probably know, inherited his father's factory in in Ireland,
and one of the workers was a young Irish woman, Murray, who he had an affair with.
So he knew the stuff.
From a very intimate setting, but they developed a theory of migration, which is, I think, worth just touching on, so let me just read this passage.
The second passage I read the movement of Irish workers to England during the industrial
revolution was the key historical experience in forming the Marxist theory of migration.
One that's still generational change, a challenging alternative to conventional ideas.
Monks started by observing that although it is widely believed their population pressed on capital, the true relationship was invented.
Capital pressed on population The purpose was to release enough labourers to staff the emerging factories while depressing the cost of labour,
but without destroying the peasant economy that had to be sufficiently preserved
to ensure that the cost of reproducing workers covering pre-natal feeding,
birth, child rearing education and old age care failed not to the capitalist but to the source country,
or that migrant workers could thus be recruited when needed.
Any drifted while not while simultaneously reducing the bargaining capacity of indigenous workers?
Well, it's an elegant theory. And there's enough in it to be plausible.
But the implied rational balancing of countervailing forces was too conspiratorial and too mechanical in the mid-19th century.
No cunning capitalist plan was able to preserve Irish peasant economy.
The Irish peasant economy,
which was at a fragile tipping point at nearly the same time that Marx and Engel's were publishing their momentous manifesto.
The potato blight struck Ireland and the Great Famine commenced.
About 1.5 million Irish people left the country, mainly to North America.
OK, so that tells that story. But I wonder also told this story to your attention because it also tells of.
And. Something that we also need to know about international solidarity, and we feel we are part of that story as well.
And the Irish seem to be rather good at public monuments.
This comes from Cork in the park and it's in the shape of a feeding bowl, but it's made up of Suva feathers eagle feathers from the Choctaw Nation,
one of the Native American peoples who, amazingly because they had just been displaced themselves.
And this phenomenon, known as the Trail of Tears, raised money.
In support of the Irish famine victims.
And this is a commemoration of that, and in fact, the chief of the Native American tribes, each of those came over to dedicate that.
So it's a wonderful tale of migration and of connexion between people.
And this last slide is another connexion,
one that I think British politicians would be wise to understand because Irish America is a very powerful force in the United States politically,
and it's conventional for people without even remotely connexion to visit their ancestral home in Ireland.
Here you can see Reagan doing doing this in a coat that is clearly covering a bullet proof vest or something that doesn't quite fit.
But you go. So that's the Irish story, and I want to then turn on to my third theme,
which links together two chapters one on mass displacement and the other on the question of wolves and whether wolves can stop liberation.
So here's the first slide.
And this is a slide not of migration or international migration at large, because we're talking about bigger numbers than this.
But the numbers of people who have been displaced and have come to the attention in various ways of the United Nations High Commission for refugees,
these are refugees. They displaced people, internally displaced people.
They include those people in Gaza and so on. But just look at that extraordinary graph from 1951,
when the United Nations Convention on Refugees was formed and when we first developed a legal framework to integrate refugees and displaced people.
And how, in a sense, the numbers have gone completely in the wrong direction in the South.
When I say the wrong direction, they seem to be growing at such a pace that the nation state system,
the migration refugee system, is unable to process them.
So let me try and illustrate this with this little. Thank.
OK, in the time that that took to swivel. One person was displaced and in terms of the every day.
Integration of Displaces, who was settled in 19 in 2018, last year, only 1.3 percent was settled.
So we're talking about a very big problem. OK, then on one hand, the growth of people who need settlement is going on now.
On the other hand, a capacity or willingness to integrate them and settle them is came down.
So another one. And what has been the response?
Well, of course, there are many examples of generosity of spirit.
One has to think, for example, of the Jersey girl or Chancellor Merkel in Germany.
But the generality of the responses has been to ward of migration,
rather than to embrace people who are displaced or seeking settlement for other reasons.
And we can now document this. So that's the wall going up, the Berlin Wall going up symbolically, of course, the wall.
When we talk about walls and it came down in 89, I.
Yes, that's right. In 89 and at that time, there were roughly speaking, 16 walls worldwide.
Now I use walls more metaphorically then.
Exactly because wolves can be quite exotic. And if you look at the Spanish Sahara, there is a wall that is made out of sand and.
Been banked up, and you say that can't be very formidable. Well, it is actually if it's been mined, which it has been.
OK. And there are fences there, barbed wire, there are all kinds of ways of walling people off.
So we use the word in a rather loose sentence. And you sense 15 in 1989, 65 walls of similar sort now.
So quadrupling the number of walls.
So it's not just President Trump who's building walls and walls between India and Bangladesh, and there are many other examples.
And I want to just show you one or two. Look at that one.
Now that isn't breaking the law. That is a very good artist, drawing a break in the wall, and it's one of the ways in which walls have,
as it were proliferated in terms of our own understanding of wills is as we proliferate the vocabulary of walls.
So this one is called a separation barrier, not a rule.
The Israelis insist it's not a war that looks quite like a wall to those people looking to photograph.
But. What's interesting about this war is you'd think, well, OK.
Most people would not be very keen on the idea of a wall separating one sovereign country to another.
But perhaps as a result of the enormous conflicts in the area, the Green Line, which is the 67 barrier, could be walled off.
Could be. So is that what this is about, this is about?
No, it turns out that the Israeli separation barrier is twice the length of the Green Line,
and it snakes its way to incorporate various Israeli settlements and to squeeze out various Palestinian settlements.
So this is a wall. There is also a statement not merely of national sovereignty, but of some kind of movement, of some claim to new land and so on.
So that's kind of interesting war and look at this one.
This CO2. One of two positions that Spain has in those African enclaves in Morocco, and it's only about nine miles,
14 kilometres to Cadiz through the province of Cadiz in Spain, across the Straits of Gibraltar.
And in this little Spanish enclave, that's of course, European territory and.
Africans who are standing on the top of that wall spoke fence.
Occasionally break the fence down, jump over it.
And are in Europe, which point their incarceration in a camp in Qatar, but some of them make it through.
So this is the raw end of Fortress Europe and they have been known.
In the sense of people approaching the fence and getting clubbed or with fists then punched back across the border,
so this is about as raw and as horrible as it gets. And that's Europe.
And then we come on to the notorious wall,
the wall that President Trump wishes to build across the Rio Grande Valley along along the Rio Grande, which he calls his big, beautiful wall.
And you may recall that during his presidential campaign, over and over again,
he recited the core build that will build our border, and the supporters responded Build that will build a wall.
He had all the various fanciful ideas that Mexico would pay for the wall and so on.
But this is a very interesting case because, as you can see from that diagram.
There isn't no war and then a war or a proposed war.
There have been barriers of various sorts going up for years on end,
and so it's been possible to track the effect of increased ordering or creation of orders from and.
Over time.
And one very important population, sociologist, demographer called and Douglas Massey at Princeton has been analysing whether will work and to do so.
He's been trying to look at the effect of the gradual hardening of the wall.
And what he's found generally is as the wall gets tougher and tougher as more of the easy crossings get walled off.
So it's become more and more expensive to cross the wall.
So for that reason, it one way crossings have accelerated compared with.
Transversal circulation.
OK, bear in mind, this is a common Zain, it's been economically the same zone for many, many years and Hispanic America as Mexico extended.
That's why the place is called Los Angeles and San Francisco and so on will be Spanish
names or indicative of the fact that Spanish America was part of the in terms of politics,
law, economics, culture and everything else. So what Massey found is as the world gets tighter.
So the one way crossings go up, go up and people don't find it's the reason being, of course, it's more expensive to hire people.
It's more expensive to pay off the border crossings.
And so it's not worth your while coming back for family holidays, for routines, for retirement and so on.
Because if you come back to Mexico, you will find it very difficult and very expensive to return to the United States.
So the paradox of this, as and as he points out, is the war is actually keeping people in rather than keeping them out.
And he's got lots of statistics to try and demonstrate.
So this is a one interesting example, but I want to also turn to something, if you like, of a more symbolic understanding of the war because you know,
it may be that walls don't literally work in the sense of keeping people out or don't work very well or don't work in all circumstances,
we have to talk about all sorts of different examples. I'm not making a generalisation that they never work and they don't work at all.
But that they work at different levels. And one of the ways in which they work is symbolic.
So I wonder, in my last passage, talk about why build a wall?
So. This is what it reads.
It would be an exaggeration to say that walls and similar barriers have no effect on inward investment, inward migration flows.
But the potency is vastly exaggerated in the USA Mexico situation.
There's a good case to be made that facilitating return through easy remittance of
earnings tax breaks and working with the Mexican authorities to enhance return,
these investments would be more effective in barrier controls.
This suggests that walls are being erected for other reasons,
principally as a way of assuaging longstanding residents as residents angry reaction to foreigners.
Trump's big, beautiful wall, as he calls it, is a visible and concrete reminder of the phrase We hear you there.
In observing a similar similar phenomenon in Israel.
Rachel Busby, Rachel Buzz Bridge suggests that a wall is a performance of sovereignty, a way of bombastic Lee declaring a physical space to be ours.
She explains that a wall also quote reflects deep power asymmetries, with its materiality holding profound,
discursive and effective implication for the subjectivities and psyches of the respective nations, unquote.
So a wall is sending a powerful message, not only saying you can't come here, but also that we can enforce our will because we are stronger,
which is precisely the message that Trump supporters wish to hear in shooting.
In short, controlling migration is far less important to populist leaders than appearing to control migration.
OK. Right, sir.
The last slide simply is the rather extraordinary picture of a young woman that appears on the front cover next to the Frontispiece in the book,
so hopefully that will encourage you to buy a book.
So we've got a quick Q&A and I'm going to take the opportunity to pass a copy
around if you make sure it comes back to me and I'll turn now to our team.
Thanks. Thanks so much, Robyn. That was fantastic.
Three remarkable little tasters of the book, which I'm sure will entice us all to suggest it.
And I particularly liked your starting with the dad. Incidentally, if any of you interested in your own DNA,
National Geographic and various others allow you to set off a bit of saliva and you will see that we all come from East Africa.
Just I did it on both my mothers and father signs. The front and back of my book Exceptional People, is that traced?
But we all Africans, and that was a very good starting point, not least for two South Africans.
Great. We have about twenty five minutes who would like to pose the first question.
We are being live streamed and webcast and video.
So if you don't want to be recorded, I suggest you don't ask a question.
There is in the back as to a person of the. First of all, very fascinating talk, thank you very much.
One of your slides there was looking at the numbers and the increase of displacement saw quite a significant spike around 1972 1973,
which seemed to kind of precede the trend in growth.
And I was just wondering what happened around that period that might have contributed towards that,
that spike and that that influenced the growth in numbers over subsequent years.
You. I think you might have floored me on looking, does anyone have the answer?
With my friend Geoffrey and Oliver?
Yes, it's the expulsion from Uganda. Oh yes.
Yes, that would have accounted for some, but not as if not quite those numbers.
I think it may be the expulsions from East Africa and in particular from Uganda
that created a spike because it was in the hundreds of thousands and ultimately.
So I may be wrong, but I think that was it because the Vietnamese boat people came out.
I'm sure that's part of it. That, of course, is a crucial element there.
I suspect I'm just sort of thinking on the torture here that this was a period when legitimate.
Migration was squeezed rather dramatically in Europe.
I mean, I'm sure you Ugandans are part of the story, but they're relatively small numbers involved,
given that we're talking about millions and I suspect this may be the displaced people.
This is a different gate because they couldn't come in as legitimate refugees because there was a big I remember the
recession following the oil price hikes of the early 70s led to quite a strong squeeze on legitimate migration into Europe.
So that may also be part of it. But thank you very much. That's a good contribution.
I was living at the time. Yeah, I'm good.
I guess the mikes in the front now, and we'll move backwards if.
Thank you.
Using biological terms at one point in history, did the Negro population turn into the three races of Negro aged Caucasian, Caucasian and mongoloid?
Yeah. OK, so these expressions, of course, on someone I've dated, people don't tend to use them quite so often.
But I want to address your point quite directly by pointing to something that I think was a bit of a surprise for most of us,
which was a fossil discovery in the Cheddar Gorge in the UK,
in which reconstructed produce somebody who had a dog's skin for at least 30000 years longer than people had anticipated.
So this is a little peculiar because obviously light is lighter, skin is better adapted to.
Climates where you would have lower sun and you need vitamin D for your health.
So the assumption was that adaptive response had come quite a lot earlier.
So it seems as if darker skinned people were in Europe much later than had normally been sued.
Now, obviously, people look different and the evolutionary.
The story is partly that is best expressed in terms of the tree.
OK, if you imagine the branch and all branches of trees splayed out to the different continents,
the continents then drifting apart or access becoming much more difficult because of the Ice Age or various other phenomena,
then you begin to get certain genetic characteristics and customs taking place.
And I suppose one would want to take those different points.
But this is what in a sense kind of surprising me because you suddenly find, Oh,
here's a discovery of somebody in Indonesia on Sumatra who looks somewhat like somebody in Polynesia or Madagascar.
So it's not quite so obvious as splitting into three,
but certainly that that splitting phenomena in terms of physical appearance did occur through adaptive response,
genetic drift and a degree of clustering of genetic clustering.
And you may want to add something you know, you said that, uh, you know,
I wondered if you in your research for your book and the book itself looked at the very
important historical walls like ancient Hadrian's Wall and the Great Wall of China,
the short and long term effects of those you yeah.
And when I say, look, Judge, I was aware of that when I was doing that chapter on walls and thought quite hard about whether that,
you know, there were analogies that could be drawn from that.
And of course, there's no doubt that they did mark of a civilizational outposts.
So Hadrian's Wall was really saying the Roman Empire kind of ends here.
I'm less convinced that it was really an effective.
Barrier, you know, if you haven't walked Hadrian's Wall, but.
I've seen pictures of and talk to people who've walked in, and it actually isn't that formidable an obstacle.
So one does wonder whether it was much more like the Trumpian symbolic war that it was a way of saying.
Here we are. There you are.
And I think that's probably untrue of the Great Wall of China, which would seem to be a pretty serious affair with,
you know, soldiers patrolling it and the gift attempt to keep out alien invaders.
So I think the answer is what the study of rules is really interesting because they work at different levels, practical and symbolic.
And that, I suppose, was the kind of argument I was trying to make.
In the in the first part of your book, you you emphasised all the disadvantages of sedentary.
Yep. OK.
You fight it off a little bit. But I think you was saying, what about the advantages of the sedentary life?
Yeah. Well, of course, you know, in a way, I was trying to contradict the conventional wisdom.
So virtually every sort of undergraduate or school textbook would talk in terms of settled agriculture, civilisation of Mesopotamia of Egypt,
praising the sedentary and as if you like the the form of civilisation that is sort of obvious, that is is teleological.
That's where human beings we're we're we're destined to be.
And I think this new take on it basically arises from the post Gaia world, where we are understanding the Earth is a much more fragile object.
So civilisations tramping through the jungles and putting up Great Mayan pyramids are not really what it's all about.
What is it all about now is stewardship of trying to ensure that this fragile planet is not further trampled or further disadvantaged.
So I think perhaps one might want to say there is a golden age of sedentary civilisations which may be coming to an end.
And this sounds very apocalyptic. I don't mean to sound like a prophet or something like that,
but we're beginning to understand that there are serious disadvantages when we put up skyscrapers and millions of birds smash into them.
And that is in such great, such great news.
And when we have floods that arise from the fact that we've just saved away all our wetlands, we too have settled agriculture.
That's not such great news. And of course we can. You know, we can.
We can, we can carry on that argument.
And the the two authors that I quote on Harare, people will know his book Sapiens Book it often for perhaps less often read, but he doesn't.
He does make this point about the relative hours that we spend.
Making our life livelihood compared with early and forages and another important book by Suzman on,
I think it's called primitive affluence and where he suggests actually these folk were living in pretty good lifespans.
They were in good health. They had a sort of harmonic relationship was with nature and and of course, they lasted for 200000 years.
And they're not that many empires. In fact, there were none that lasted for 200000 years.
And so I think one does need to rethink our conventional narrative of human history and maybe say, Well, maybe we're not doing it completely right.
Yeah. Oh, actually, I'll be backtracking a little bit, I wanted to add on to the discussion about the Great Wall of China.
And I was thinking that actually an interesting idea about the potential ambivalence of walls because while at certain points in Chinese history,
walls were to keep people like there was not,
one group of people called the song out of China because they were trading at other points that there were actually political negotiation type,
intellectual marriages with the Chinese state to kind of keep the border pacified.
And then we have, at other points, the empire going beyond the walls to conquer people and to expand its territory.
So I just thought it may be really interesting to think about how wars can mark a boundary,
but maybe the kind of interaction that is happening is not necessarily one of separation,
but actually underscores a specific kind of interaction that that sort of interaction could change with time.
And I thought maybe interesting when we think about the wall between Mexico and the United States,
because that actually the true picture is actually two countries that economically, socially and culturally intertwined in many ways.
So yeah, I just wanted to add to that. OK, thanks very much.
I'm not going to respond because you're clearly will [INAUDIBLE] of a lot more than I do, because thank you very much for that contribution.
Yeah, thanks very much, Robin.
As you know, there are dozens of articles which start off with the observation that international migration is now much larger in numbers,
more widespread in geographical scale and more complex in nature than any other time in human history.
Is that actually true? Okay. Jeff, thanks very much.
This is a one one that US migration scholars wrestle with all the time because on the one hand,
we want to make sure that we don't overestimate the crisis logic.
Oh, it's so bad. The more migrants, the terrible. And then, of course, the the comparison point is important.
And I suppose the easiest comparison which many people do use as the comparison
point is with the United States and in particular with transatlantic migration.
So without getting into the full international complexities, let's just deal with that.
Atlantic migration, which happens essentially after the movement from sale to steam 1882 roughly.
And then you begin to get a huge migration across the Atlantic to the point
where it ends rather abruptly in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War.
Because the merchant navy is then appropriated for war purposes,
or it is feared that people migrating will be sunk by German submarines, as there were some examples of that.
You may be aware so you've got this nice little period, 1880 to 1914.
At that point, the level of migration relative to the local population was higher than the current level of migration.
So, however, it was roughly foreign born to local at its height was roughly about 16 percent, I think.
And now it's creeping up to about 13 percent.
So it's certainly high by historical standards, but not the highest it's ever been.
Particularly, of course, that migration flows are often determined by how keen not only the people who are migrating,
but how keen they are you are to have migrants and.
At the turn of the 19th 20th century, for many people, having a large population was an important way of affirming your national power.
It was a way of expanding your industrial base in the United States.
There is no doubt that the big push in industrialisation was driven by.
Large scale immigration, and you can see it in the first instance from people being displaced off the land,
the so-called great migration from the south to the north of, say and black Americans,
but also transatlantic migrants who were used in the emerging factories and those who want to study and marvellously racist tract.
You can have a look at Henry Ford's biography autobiography,
where he describes how he wishes to use these different formations of immigrants for different purposes.
So one group would be good on screws, the others would be good or nuts.
And as for a dumb Pollux, his words, they would be good in cleaning up, you know, that kind of thing.
So he was quite aware of the need for immigrant labour.
So I don't know. That obviously doesn't answer the question entirely, because you'd have to take different sizes, different periods, different things.
So it's a matter of measured response. It's not enormous by historic standards, but it is important now.
Yeah. Good to see you, Jeff. I've done some recent work on this, and I think this is just some headlines.
It's about 3.4 percent of the world's population now. It's been much higher in the late 19th century.
It's been in this new normal for about the last thirty five years.
That's particularly if you don't include refugees and a big part of this with big growth as being refugees.
Of course, the absolute numbers must be. The other important point to bear in mind is that there's a hundred new countries and by definition,
if migrants or people that cross borders create a hundred new countries,
you would expect actually the numbers to be much higher than they were crossing the same space like the Soviet Union,
disintegrated into 15 countries, for example. So if you discount that, it's actually lower.
And of course, the other point is that we now count migrants. There were no passports until the First World War for most countries and most places.
And so what we understand about migration is fundamentally different, and there's the counting might also be contributing to growing awareness.
I mean, that's a that's a terribly helpful intervention. Things.
And and in fact, those you haven't seen it, there's a very good paper by in which I think Citibank commissioned on the Oxford Martin School website,
which goes through some of these data in considerable detail and some very nice graphs as well.
Yeah. Hello. I really enjoyed the talk just as one point.
I suspect that the spike in the early 70s may have been the then civil war between Pakistan and Bangladesh,
which displaced at that time untold numbers of people.
My second question, my my other point rather, is I just wanted to pick up on something Professor Golden mentioned,
which is perhaps the difference between being forcibly displaced and voluntary migration.
I was wondering if you could give us forcibly displaced and forcibly displaced people and people who have migrated voluntarily for,
you know, it's very difficult to judge what economic circumstances are forced upon which are not.
But if you could give us some sense of scale, that would be very helpful to understand the context here.
Thank you. OK, now this is the big hot potato, and we even have it institutionally hardwired into Oxford,
where we have migration centre and we have a refugee study centre.
And we have this debate endlessly about differences between the two, those people who are compelled and those people who are free to migrate.
And of course, the great problem with this is that you spend a lot of time on the definition.
I want to just make one or two fairly obvious points.
If you look on the refugee side, quite a high proportion,
an increasing proportion of people who are refugees deemed refugees or are seen as refugees by others
who self proclaimed themselves as refugees are coming with children and with people accompanying them.
So it's not 1951, when you have people who are self-declared refugees who might have a political opinion that differed
from their country of origin and therefore therefore getting recognition in the legal system,
you're having mass movement. And so it's very difficult to say this person is a refugee and that person is not.
How do you classify child, for example, in those circumstances?
Do they simply take on the definition of their parent and which parent so that it gets complicated on the other side as well?
Because, of course, people. All pushed by all sorts of forces, some of which are not formally registered in the legal framework,
which recognises refugees now, the most obvious, of course, is if economic factors,
but also there are such things as, you know,
gender discrimination or sex discrimination bill all people moving for all kinds of compelling reasons other than simply seeking a new life abroad.
So the short answer is it's it's very difficult to get a kind of take on this question,
but I'm going to do a big sort of end golden venture into big numbers.
And you may correct me if I'm wrong and I think roughly on the on the defined.
Migrants died about 270 million and on the defined displaced.
Outside. 70 million. But just be careful about those numbers because definitions are incredibly
important in understanding how we place people into one category or the other.
I'm more or less. Yeah, absolutely. We got lucky the last just two quick questions.
I'm just wondering what you think of thought about the late Barbara Harrison's work regarding refugees in Oxford.
My single question will be whether you think about global displacement because of climate change or forced migration.
Yeah, yeah.
OK, thanks very much, because that's very important, and you know, of course, on climate displacement is not recognised in the 51 convention.
So it's partly an answer to the previous intervention as well to say thank you for that intervention.
There is a separate chapter in the book on climate induced migration, and obviously it's incredibly important.
The broad generalisation I would make is that we tend because it's telegenic to focus on rising sea levels.
And of course, there are some dramatic examples of countries that are about to disappear on one or two.
Small cases have disappeared.
And so we imagine that what is happening is the rising sea creates just mass displacement and then that then results in international displacement.
And then you get quite a lot of alarmist discussion about this.
The much more plausible argument to make is that sea levels are rising and rising relatively slowly,
and people have to back off the sea into higher land.
And so there is some element of adjustment. However, if you look at the big numbers on climate displaced migration,
you often find places where horrible lands are no longer possible and where people cannot actually engage in settled agriculture anymore.
So they become rootless. They move into that category of people seeking a new life.
So yes, it's very important numerically, but don't be dazzled by the coastal story or then confine the argument to the coastal story.
There's also a very important story about arable agriculture.
Great. I think that's all we've got time for this.
Over 40 chapters in the book and I encourage you to look at this incredible array of arguments, images and data that Robin's assembled.
He's only got 40 copies of his book at 10 pounds available,
so the first 40 will get them the rest of you going to have to buy to 20 pounds of black Blackwell's or elsewhere.
And so I encourage you to buy it if the auction guys on screen not only give incredible free intellectual food,
but you also get a drink after something like this.
And so I invite you all to the reception, which will be out the door and next door,
and then you can carry a new conversation with each other and with Robin as well.
Thanks to you all for coming. It's been a dark, cold night and thanks to Robin.
When you run.